Some Stupid

Here's Some Stupid for Lunch

In which we're still arguing about whether or not campaign finance reform is a major issue.

By Charles P. Pierce

At the Cafe, we often sit around and chat about things we on the staff wish we had written. Right at the top of the list is Jay Rosen's brilliant reference to The Church Of The Savvy, which is Rosen's way of taking the piss out of people like The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, the hard-bitten political scribe who doesn't have any illusions and who calls 'em as he sees 'em. In The Church Of The Savvy, Chris Cillizza is papal nuncio to benighted souls who believe that democracy also belongs to them, inside and outside the Church. On Wednesday, Cillizza tells the plutocrats not to be concerned. Their ownership of the political process is safe. Cillizza comes up with a tasty entree off the Misplaced Metaphor grille.

Think of it like this: If someone asked you whether you should eat better, almost all of us would say yes. Too many hamburgers, too much pizza, too many frappuccinos. (Or maybe that's just me.) But, when you go out to lunch or find yourself at the grocery store, how many of us actually make good on our stated intent to eat better? If you're anything like me, the answer is a whole heck of a lot fewer people than say that they should be eating better.

Can you see the problem here? Sure, you can. If you continue to eat like a college sophomore while guzzling fattening coffee drinks, you will die of coronary occlusion, or diabetes, or colon cancer. The basic point is you will die, and it won't matter whether your intent was prompted and/or your action unprompted. Your body simply will collapse. If we continue to allow our politics to be little more than richly rewarded legalized influence-peddling, it won't matter how clever Chris Cillizza is with the poll numbers, democracy simply will die. This would seem to be a serious problem.